


Getting Somewhere

by Pink_Siamese



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-13
Updated: 2007-08-13
Packaged: 2017-10-10 00:24:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/93219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pink_Siamese/pseuds/Pink_Siamese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"That's quite an expression on your face. You look like a man who found a lacy g-string tucked into his briefcase."</p><p>"I am a man of many secrets, Catherine."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Getting Somewhere

I.

He regretted that he wasn’t leaving the city at night.

By day it was possessed of a certain stark beauty, the quicksilver shimmer of urban sprawl melting into the receding heat and the bulwark of sharp purple mountains leering up over buildings that wavered like candle flames. Las Vegas was a neon cancer spreading out and sinking its tentacles into the earth’s stony cheek. Lake Mead bore the evidence of the city’s rampant growth: eroded layers of white showed the places where the water level had dropped in concentric rings, each a calcified step toward an overburdened future.

Evening would come, drawing its veil of shimmering mystery. The mountains receded into cut velvet shapes against the burning amethyst of twilight and the street lights in their orderly grids and the flow of traffic stretched into delicate glittering panels of fabric draped across an obsidian table. It lay like a tangle of gaudy jewels cradled by the dusty palm of the desert. Darkness obliterated the treachery of the city. It became magic by the ethereal breath of night, spun into distant and taunting dreams. It was beautiful and deadly and indifferent as a siren. How many had been lured onto its razor sharp crystalline rocks?

It was a more poetic departure to leave by night. Easier to imagine a mythical kingdom disappearing into the stone throat of the world.

Daytime was disappointing triple-digit heat and flyblown coyotes and thin skirls of dust blowing across the road.

II.

The stretch of highway between Tucson and Phoenix was monotonous: tumbled rocks like false gold, sunlight that pierced your eyes, jagged dusty mountains, washed-out sky, tumbleweeds the color of old ivory, the snarl of low-lying prickly pears and the thrust of dusty green saguaros. Saguaros were slow growers; it took seventy-five years to eke out one round bud. The patience of the tortoise was trivialized in the shadow of the saguaro. That this surreal forest of towering structures supported many long arms, some of them bearing arms upon their arms, spoke of the low desert’s unrelenting sense of stasis. Many of these cacti had been old when Columbus first dreamed of the New World.

Three hours of driving and the land started to change. The saguaros disappeared and the prickly pears receded. Tough wiry grass cropped up between the rocks and the purple sage beloved by Western novelists made its first appearance, flaunting its tenacity by clinging to sheer rock faces and wrestling with snarls of wayward tumbleweed. The sky seemed to draw in a deep breath and grow clearer. It was a vivid dark blue, like the curving inside of an antique bottle. Piñon pines grew at this altitude. They were a vigorous green that dotted the landscape like misshapen pompoms with shaggy bark and limbs twisted and knotted by the arthritic winter wind. Springtime brought a profusion of low-lying flowers.

The Valley of the Sun was her home, but it made her happy to see it fall by the wayside. It meant she was getting somewhere.

III.

She assured her picture was only six months old.

-I know how people are. You can check the date if you want.

-I believe you. Why do you trust me?

-I don’t know. I just do.

She knew her way around the topic of forensics. Her father had worked for the medical examiner.

-I tried explaining Locard’s theory of evidence exchange. She didn’t get it.

-I love it when you talk dirty.

She sent him a poem.

-I couldn’t sleep last night. So I sat up and wrote this down on an In-N-Out napkin.

-LOL…a napkin?

-Yeah. It was all I had.

-Grease stains and all.

-Yeah.

-OK. Let’s have it.

 

_Killing fields of_

_Shattered glass_

_And asphalt_

_House broken rabbits_

_And fire ants marching north_

_On the cracked yellow line._

_Birds shall not stay my hand,_

_For it is_

_The way_

_To you._

 

-I spotted a dead rabbit on the side of the road this morning. I kept thinking about it. Inspiration comes out of the strangest places.

 

His smile had been impulsive; the reality of it ached in his cheeks. He’d glanced around his office and taken a sip of coffee to cover it up. The taste of Blue Voodoo lingered, forgotten, at the back of his tongue. He put his cup down and logged off the computer and returned to work, where he spent the remainder of his shift struggling with his thoughts. He tried to steer them away from rumination, on her turn of phrase and the way her front teeth crossed slightly over one another.

In the locker room Willows commented on it:

“That’s quite an expression on your face. You look like a man who found a lacy g-string tucked into his briefcase.”

“I am a man of many secrets, Catherine.”

IV.

It was part and parcel of the online experience, this careful and patient winnowing. She cleaned out the scams, the guys from other countries, the blank subject lines. Saucy references to her line of work went straight into the trash. How many times, in how many ways, could  ‘massage therapist’ be corrupted? It astounded her how many men thought such clumsy double entendres amusing and original.

She opened his e-mail because his smile echoed that of a teacher she’d once had a crush on.

There was no discounting the power of memory.

V.

“Greg Sanders? Hello?”

He’d thought her voice would be high-pitched and mellifluous. Tones pulled from his childhood.

“It’s Lily. Lily Johnson. In Tucson?”

Measured in meteorological terms, her voice was the kind that made thunderstorms when it collided with Canadian air masses.

“Hi,” she said. “How are you?”

VI.

They’d agreed to meet in Flagstaff. Tall spindly pine trees, too many of them, muscling in upon roads awash in thin cool air. Aching blue sky. Not much more than pine woods, really, once up on the leading edge of the Colorado plateau. Flagstaff wasn’t her favorite place, but it was commodious compared to Wickenburg, easy to find, and the roads were better.

The hotel was shabby and dispirited, as though it had been built in the seventies and abandoned to the progression of years. An enclosed pool abutted the narrow parking lot. She got out of her car and her muscles creaked. She stretched, working the tension out of her shoulders as the wind came down out of the San Francisco mountains and flowed straight through her gauzy skirt. It felt refreshing to stand above the stone-baked lowland heat. The breeze moved along her arms and wrapped around her ankles, bounced tiny pebbles off the tops of her feet.

Lily walked to the solarium and marveled at its incongruity. She touched the glass. It was cool enough to swim here in the summers, yet the pool brooded in a cloud of steam behind cracked and dirty glass.

VII.

The diner was popular with the local university students. Greg sat in a booth near a row of plate glass windows, sipping Coke through a straw and fidgeting on the cracked vinyl as he stirred the ice cubes and watched the cars pass by. He twisted the straw paper into a ball. There was a menu on the table but he hadn’t bothered to look at it. The attention of the waitress was diverted by a noisy table full of teenage girls.

A little blue car pulled into the lot. He watched as a lean young woman unfolded herself from the driver’s side, pausing with one foot on the tarmac as she shifted the strap of her purse on one elegant shoulder. She climbed out and the door and looked for the horizon, indulging her bearings like a brief whim. Her skirt swished around her ankles as she strode to the door. He picked up the crinkled straw paper and ironed out the creases with his fingertips. He held it to his eye level, creasing it into a meticulous paper rose.

The front door opened.

 

_I am dark but beautiful,_

_Daughters of Jerusalem,_

_Dark as the tents of Kedar,_

_As the curtain tents of Solomon._

_Do not stare at me because I am dark,_

_It is the sun that made me so._

 

Greg had never felt himself a religious man. Lily caught his eye and smiled, slipping through the diner’s noise like a wish fashioned from amber. She charted a course for the refuge of his table. He tossed the little white rosebud into a corner and waved.

VIII.

The food wasn’t very good, but it was cheap. The atmosphere was hasty and simplistic. The sky bracketed by trees was blue and blameless. It glimmered beyond the flyspecked glass.

“So. How was the drive?”

She counted the moles on his face. They held her attention like a new constellation.

“Yeah, that road from Tucson to Sedona. My car practically drives itself.”

He sprawled in the seat. The single loosened button at his collar made an arrow of flesh. A tiny pulse nestled between his collarbones.

“I attend a lot of seminars there,” she said. “We should take a ride down. It’s beautiful.”

For one dizzy moment she clung to the regard in his eyes. Then he gave her a slow smile.

IX.

Greg felt his crafted sense of eloquence slipping away. He had a file of phrases, a passel of questions, a file folder of topics in his mind. Until now words had been his brick and mortar, his yardstick, his siren song. This very moment was engineered on a foundation of typewritten dialogue.

Amazing how language eroded at the gentle insistence of flesh.

“Not too bad. Boring, I guess. There isn’t much up here.”

Her chin perched in her hand. Her face was tilted downward and she looked up at him with blue eyes. They were almost gray. He’d never noticed this detail.

“Do you spend a lot of time in Sedona, then?”

She curled one finger around the neckline of her shirt. The nail stroked her collarbone.

“Sounds nice.”

A corner of her full mouth twitched and the smile spread across his face before he could stop it.

X.

The sound of his breath aroused her. It was soft and ragged at the edges and moved with a steady cadence, as though a tiny percent of his oxygen was a worthy price for just enough self-control. His heated air condensed on her neck. His hands cradled her hips with reverence and mounting fascination. Every time his lips met her skin she felt seared in wetness. Every time they left she became aware of her own breath.

XI.

He leaned his head back into the wall. The last of the evening light fell across the cheap white paint in dusty slats. He struggled with his breath and caressed the shape of her skull, seduced by the tiny caramel pearls of her hair. Her soft mouth enveloped his cock. His bones loosened and he slid down a little and uttered a drawn-out languorous moan. She propped him up by the hips. The cords stood out on her brown hands. He breathed hard and looked down and marveled at the strength hewn into her forearms. How they contrasted with the delicate acuity of her mouth.

XII.

He was an earnest fuck. She gripped his flanks, crossed her calves against the small of his back. He made fists of the sheets.

She left a tiny bruise on his neck.

_Remember me_, it whispered.

XIII.

“Maybe I’ll take a seminar in Las Vegas,” she said.

XIV.

“Maybe I’ll take a seminar in Tucson,” he said.

XV.

Greg thought about highway lines, how they are marked in red upon maps and designated with numerical value. The arteries of the world made flat.

The mountains drifted against the sky and the rocky shoulders blurred. The wheels hummed. The sun crawled toward an exhausted apex while desert brush strangled itself in a delirious quest for water. A rabbit scampered off into the wastes, free to die another day.

The double line. The yellow brick road. The shimmering blacktop ascending altitude. A dubious stairway to heaven.

If life is an equation, then what is the answer?

_93 + 40 + 17_.

I will show you eternity in a handful of dust.

He smiled.

_Now I’m getting somewhere_.__


End file.
